She made a swift gesture towards Mills’ vanishing figure.

“I ran across him first in London.  He was convalescing from a leg wound.  That was shortly after I was married, and I was helping entertain these stray dogs from the front.  It was quite the fashion.  People took them out motoring and so on.  I remembered Mills out of all the others because he was different from the average Tommy, quiet without being self-conscious.  I remembered thinking often what a pity nice boys like that must be killed and crippled by the thousand.  When we came here, Charlie was working down at the settlement.  Somehow I was awfully glad to see him—­any friendly face would have been welcome those first months before I grew used to these terrible silences, this complete isolation which I had never before known.

“Well, the upshot was that he fell in love with me, and for awhile—­for a little while—­I thought I was experiencing a real affection at last, myself; a new love rising fine and true out of the ashes of old ones.

“And it frightened me.  It made me stop and think.  When he would stare at me with those sad eyes I wanted to comfort him, I wanted to go away with him to some distant place where no one knew me and begin life all over again.  And I knew it wouldn’t do.  It would only be the same thing over again, because I’m made the way I am.  I was beginning to see that it would take a good deal of a man to hold my fitful fancy very long.  Charlie’s a nice boy.  He’s clean and sensitive, and I’m sure he’d be kind and good to any woman.  Still, I knew it wouldn’t do.  Curious thing—­all the while that my mind was telling me how my whole existence had unfitted me to be a wife to such a man—­for Charlie Mills is as full of romantic illusions as a seventeen-year-old girl—­at the same time some queer streak in me made me long to wipe the slate clean and start all over again.  But I could never convince myself that it was anything more than sex in me responding to the passion that so deeply moved him.  That suspicion became certainty at last.  That is why I say Charlie Mills taught me something about myself.”

“I think it was a dear lesson for him,” Hollister said, remembering the man’s moods and melancholy, the bitterness of frustration which must have torn Mills.  “You hurt him.”

“I know it, and I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help it,” she said patiently.  “There was a time just about a year ago when I very nearly went away with him.  I think he felt that I was yielding.  But I was trying to be honest with myself and with him.  With all my vagaries, my uncertain emotions, I didn’t want just the excitement of an affair, an amorous adventure.  Neither did he.  He wanted me body and soul, and I recoiled from that finally, because—­I was afraid, afraid of what our life would become when he learned that truth which I had already grasped, that life can’t be lived on the peaks of great emotion and that there was nothing much else for him and me to go on.”